What Tillie Olsen 's Her Life Story

Throughout the beginning of her speech, Kelley makes use of disturbing anecdotes that appeal to women's emotions. She first illustrates that while they “sleep, several thousand little girls” are “working in textile mills” throughout the night. This use of little girls working highlights that children all around the United States are not sleeping but are operating machines: making clothes for the adults to purchase. She incorporates this factor in order to encourage the concerned mothers to help alter labor laws so that their children are not working twelve-hour shifts. Kelley continues to describe how little girls of “six or seven years,” who are “just tall enough to reach” the machines, will be working eleven hours a day. Kelley’s use of the children's height emphasizes how as soon as children reach a certain height, they are being deprived of their childhood and sent to work in the factories. She continues to repeat the phrase that “while [they] sleep” little girls and boys “will be working” in the mills. Kelley’s continual use of this phrase evokes sympathy in the women so they can help change the lives of children by amending the harsh child labor laws.

Women’s history in the United States has always been represented as a struggle for rights. Wealth and status were tied to either their fathers or husbands. In the early 1900s, women were afforded the traditional roles of society. The majority of women worked in the home. If they were of the 18% young or poor women, they also worked in factories as laborers, manufacturing items for the booming industrial revolution (U.S. Department of Labor, 1980). During this time period the workplace was not in compliance with current safety standards. There was no minimum wage yet, work conditions were horrible and they worked long hours, “In 1900, the average workweek in manufacturing was 53 hours,” (Fisk, 2003). Women took “pink

Woman along with the children were affected while working during the industrial revolution. During 1834 and 1836 Harriet Martineau, a British feminist and abolitionist, visited America and enthusiastically embraced the social implications of the Industrial Revolution, (DTA, 223). Martineau compared the lifestyle of women to slaves and said the United States contradicted the principles of the Declaration of Independence. She did believe though with some progress that it could become New England’s new industrial order. One of the Mill factories Martineau visited, Waltham Mill, was a prime example of the scheduled lifestyle of women mill workers. Women Mill workers of all ages worked at Waltham Mill, which I compared to a boarding school because of their strict schedules. The ladies had a time to wake up, to be at work, to eat, and to go to school. A lot of women did not mind the harsh conditions they lived and worked in because they fought for their equality of rights for a long time now.

Since capitalism has existed, children have been able to work. These children have worked in the harshest conditions and the longest hours. With thousands of children working in the United States, social worker Florence Kelley decided something needed to be done about it. So on July 22, 1905, she delivered a speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), analyzing, and explaining the problems with children in the workplace. She uses the rhetorical strategy, cause and effect, to exemplify the pros and cons of child labor at the time. Kelley later explains how her thoughts can reflect on the future of child labor in the United States.

Improving undesirable working conditions for women and eliminating child labor was an impassioned issue for female reformers during the time of industrialization in the United States. Florence Kelley, a united states social worker and reformer, opposes the appalling work environment children as young as six would toil through and relays her speech to the National Woman Suffrage Association to propel her audience to demand changes that are necessary to stop countless hours of hard-work the youth struggle to complete. Kelley adopts a fervid tone in order to convince the audience that political action is needed to adjust the laws that allows child labor to continue in many states with her use of pathos and rhetorical questions meant to stir action

Throughout time, women have been considered housewives and mothers. Not all women stayed home, throughout history women have worked, mainly clerical jobs, teaching, charity workers, and other less demanding physical work. It was never a new thing that women were in the work force, it was the impact the propaganda posters and WWII made on the women in that workforce. This propaganda poster; titled “We Can Do It” features a beautiful women with her arm flexed and she is in her work coveralls, above her it say “We can do it.” the author is J. Howard Miller, he uses pathos and ethos to inspire a social movement that increased the number of working women, and changed the face of the workforce.

In Document A, the majority of the 10,000 workers were young, unmarried women from farm families. The women took on a significant role in the mills; tending the spinning machine and producing cotton textiles. The owners of the mills offered housing and education to increase the interest for women to work. In document C, Sally Rice, a young woman from Vermont, went to look for her own job away from the farm her family owned. She found work as a domestic servant in New York, and then found another job weaving in a cotton mill in Blackstone Valley. She wished to earn her own money and become more independent. In her letters to her family, she describes how great her work is. She said, “I have one of the best homes and good society which is a good deal better than I can have there [at home].” In both of these examples the women became more independent, accepted more responsibility, and untimely became

She was always put down for her actions as a child, and never got credit for anything she did. Considering the circumstances, in later life she decided to make her own choices and set herself goals for a new life. After escaping from her slave owner, she had reached the borderline of her life of prison and her escape to start a new life. When she had crossed the line, Tubman had wrote that not only had she escaped, but she was going to help her family and friends escape as well. She was never self centered.

Although females had push into the right direction, they still did face some adversity. “Many fully employed women defined themseleves as ‘homemakers’, outside the sphere of wage work” (Abelson, 117). This shows that even with all these changes for the better women did not shy away from their traditional roots.

YOUNG UNMARRIED WOMEN: Public acceptance of wage-earning jobs for young unmarried women was growing. No longer being limited to work as "mill girls" or domestics, these women began to perform clerical work in offices and

After realizing that she was not the type to sit back and do nothing, she accepted an invitation to teach at a Sunday school at the East Cambridge Jail in East Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1941 (www.mfh.org,1). That’s when her quest began. She was shocked when she saw that mentally ill patients were being put into the jails, and even more appalled at the conditions they were put in.

Olsen Takes a Stand Through Literature During the 19th century the American people benefited from industrial growth but, in turn they also experienced the negative effects of the growing nation. People worked long hours for a minimal pay. Poverty was common as well as well as discrimination which was prominent throughout most communities; specifically targeting the lower-class, women, people of color, and immigrants. Tillie Olsen, the daughter of two Russian Jewish immigrants, faced the social injustices troubling many Americans in the 20th century.

During the war in the 1940s, an aggressive media campaign urged more than six million women into the workforce. It is astonishing seeing each year; there were better accomplishments that women were making. Many learned new techniques such as working in steel plants, shipyards, and lumber mills. Sports also became a new and admired era in this time. The famous “Rosie the Riveter”, “We Can Do It!” was a part of the governor campaign that brought women into the workplace during the war. Following the end of WWII, most of these jobs went back to the men, and women were encouraged to either return back home or find a “female” job. This reveals that women were used. They were only needed when most of the men were in the war. In

Tillie Olsen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913, the child of political refugees from Russia. Olsen dropped out of school at the age of sixteen to help support her family during the depression. She became politically active in the Young Communist League and was involved in the Warehouse Union’s labor disputes in Kansas City. Her first novel, Yonnondio, about a poor, working-class family, was begun when she was nineteen. While writing the novel over the next four years, she gave birth to her first child and was left to raise the baby alone after her husband abandoned her. She married Jack Olsen in 1936 and had three more children. She remained politically active and held down various jobs while

women to work but many had to support their family some way so they worked despite the low wages and horrible conditions (Women, 2010). The Ziegfield Image source:silverscreenmodiste.comsilverscreenmodiste.comsilverscreenmodiste.com